Still counting

WASHINGTON -- President Bush and challenger John Kerry traded early swing-state victories Tuesday night, then sweated out a tension-packed conclusion to the race between an embattled incumbent and a Democrat who questioned the war the Republican waged in Iraq.

With results pouring in from Connecticut to California, the race remained wide open shortly before midnight, the big battlegrounds of Florida and Ohio still close contests.

If Ohio did fall into Bush's column, as several networks were projecting, the president was one electoral vote from re-election early this morning.

The electoral math was excruciating: Bush won 24 states including a contested West Virginia for 210 electoral votes. Kerry won 12 states plus the District of Columbia for 188 votes, including three from swing-state Maine.

Neither man had managed to turn around a state from 2000, a requirement for Kerry because states won by Democrat Al Gore in 2000 were worth just 260 votes this year due to redistricting -- 10 short of the total needed to win the presidency.

Bush lost Pennsylvania, a major blow after courting voters with steel tariffs and 44 visits -- the most of any state -- in a bid to steal it from the Democrats. The loss raises the stakes in Florida and Ohio, both won by Bush in 2000.

With 95 percent of precincts in Florida reporting, Bush had 52 percent, while John Kerry had 47 percent. Returns were slow to come in from urban South Florida, where Kerry has strong support and turnout was heavy.

In Miami-Dade County, some voters waited to cast ballots more than four hours after polls closed at 8 p.m. Some lines began forming 90 minutes before polls opened, and a voter at the University of Miami said she spent nearly six hours in line.

Independent candidate Ralph Nader could play the spoiler in New Hampshire and Nevada.

There was little suspense in Congress, where Republicans were reaching to expand their majorities. They seized Democratic seats in Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina, ensuring their grip on the Senate. The GOP was virtually assured of holding the House.

Alongside the White House and congressional races, a full roster of propositions and local offices kept voters busy. But all eyes were focused on Kerry's bid to make Bush the first president voted out of office in the midst of a war.

"I believe I will win, thank you very much," Bush said while awaiting results from the hard-fought Midwest and Florida with his family and dog Barney.

Kerry, a four-term Massachusetts senator, allowed himself to muse about the problems he might face in the White House, including a soaring deficit and a war that has claimed more than 1,100 lives.

"I'm not pretending to anybody that it's a bed of roses," the Democrat said.

The race showed signs of being as close as 2000, when Bush lost the popular vote to Gore but won the Electoral College count and the presidency after a ruling by the Supreme Court gave him Florida. The incumbent hoped to avoid the fate of his father -- former President George H.W. Bush, who was bounced by voters in 1992 after waging war against Iraq and overseeing an ailing economy.

Braced for a replay of the 2000 recount, legions of lawyers and election-rights activists watched for signs of voter fraud or disenfranchisement. New lawsuits sought clearer standards to evaluate provisional ballots in Ohio and a longer deadline to count absentee ballots in Florida.

While complaints were widespread, they weren't significant. "So far, it's no big, but lots of littles," said elections expert Doug Chapin.

Voters were torn over the presidential race, in ways all too familiar.

Exit polls suggested that slightly more voters trusted Bush to handle terrorism than Kerry. A majority said the country was safer from terrorism than four years ago, and they overwhelmingly backed Bush.

However, among those who said they were very worried about a terrorist strike, Kerry held a slight lead. That was a troubling sign for the incumbent as was this: A majority of voters said things were going poorly in Iraq, and they heavily favored Kerry.

With nearly 1 million jobs lost in Bush's term, Kerry was favored by eight of 10 voters who listed the economy as a top issue.

The nation's mood? There was division on that, too. Half said the country was headed in the right direction, a good sign for the incumbent.

Voters welcomed an end to the longest, most expensive presidential election on record. "It's the only way to make the ads stop," Amanda Karel, 25, said as she waited to vote at a banquet hall in Columbus, Ohio.

Both sides spent a combined $600 million on TV and radio ads, more than twice the total from 2000.

Bush won among white men, voters with family incomes above $100,000 and weekly churchgoers. Three-fourths of white voters who described themselves as born-again Christians or evangelicals supported Bush.

The president had hoped to increase his support among the religious right since 2000, but exit polls suggest there was little change.

Kerry retained Gore's margins among blacks and union households, key parts of the Democratic base. His voters named the economy and Iraq as top issues.

One in 10 voters were casting ballots for the first time and fewer than 10 percent were young voters, hardly the groundswell that experts had predicted. Kerry was favored by both groups, according to the surveys conducted for The Associated Press by Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International.

Officials predicted a turnout of 117.5 million to 121 million people, the most ever and rivaling the 1960 election in the percentage of eligible voters going to the polls.

Poring over exit polls and field reports, Bush's aides in Arlington, Va., identified low-turnout precincts and dispatched more walkers to them. In Boston, advisers gave Kerry a longer-than-expected list of TV interviews to conduct by satellite to Wisconsin, Minnesota, Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada and Oregon.

That was an interesting list: Oregon was supposed to be safely Democratic and Colorado had seemed to be tilting toward Bush heading into Tuesday.

In the final hours of the campaign, Kerry's aides tried to boost turnout in Hispanic areas by having the candidate's wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry, do Spanish-language television interviews. Exit polls showed the Democrat winning the Hispanic vote, but not by as much as Gore in 2000.

Voters in Wisconsin, Michigan and Ohio received a wave of last-minute telephone calls as Kerry's strategists sought to nail down victories in those key Midwest battlegrounds.

Bush won Alabama, Arkansas, Arizona, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, North Carolina, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, West Virginia and Wyoming.

Kerry won California, Connecticut, Delaware, the District of Columbia, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont and statewide in Maine. One Maine vote remained a tossup.

In the Senate, Republican Johnny Isakson took the seat held by retiring Democratic Sen. Zell Miller in Georgia. Republican Rep. Jim DeMint won the South Carolina seat held by retiring Democratic Sen. Fritz Hollings. And in North Carolina, Republican Rep. Richard Burr won the seat left open by Democratic vice presidential candidate John Edwards.

Only nine of 34 Senate races on the ballot appeared competitive. One of them was held by Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle, who was in a pitched fight against Republican John Thune.

All 435 House seats were up for election, but Democrats had little hope of a takeover. Republicans hold 227 seats, Democrats 205, with one Democratic-leaning independent and two vacancies in Republican-held seats.

With strategies molded by polls throughout the campaign, Kerry promised voters a new direction while Bush played up the risks of change.

Eleven gubernatorial contests were being decided Tuesday, along with 5,800 legislative seats in 44 states. Former Bush administration budget director Mitch Daniels won the governorship in Indiana, taking the seat from the Democrats.

Among the notable ballot measures, voters in Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, Michigan, Mississippi, Ohio and Oklahoma approved propositions that would ban gay marriage.